Susan Orlean's favorite apps of 2010

hiCard - This app lets you come up with quick ecards for all those occasions when you didn't get around to sending a real card and a flat old email is too cold. Susan says it can import contact information from the address book on your phone so you can get the whole thing done while stopped at a red light.

Shazam - Not the newest app in the app store but one that still has the power to dazzle and produce those "what hath technology wrought" moments. Shazam lets you point your phone at a song on the radio, find out the artist, song name and album, and even buy the song right then and there.

Evernote - Susan loves this app so much that she ought to go ahead and marry it. Evernote is a system of keeping information -- photos, phone numbers, notes of all kinds -- and accessing it from wherever you get online. Susan says she can take a picture of her printer cartridge, store it in the cloud, and then know what kind of cartridge to buy at Sam's Club.

Poetry - This one's sponsored by The Poetry Foundation and it's free. A massive searchable library of poems, ready for you when you need a pithy thought.

Bump - If you have the Bump app and your friend has the Bump app, you can literally bump your phones together and share contacts, photos, and calendar events.